Alien Resurrection

Ellen Ripley's sacrifice on Fiorina 161 should have ended her story.

Two centuries later, scientists aboard the military research vessel USM Auriga have other ideas.

Using preserved genetic material, they successfully create a Ripley clone as part of an experiment to recover the Xenomorph Queen that died inside her.

The procedure works — eventually.

What emerges as Ripley 8, however, is not a perfect recreation of the woman who died. The cloning process has mixed elements of Ripley's DNA with the creature's, leaving her with heightened abilities and an unsettling connection to the species she once dedicated her life to destroying.

And once again, human beings believe they can control the Alien.

Once again, they are wrong.

Sigourney Weaver's fourth performance as Ripley deliberately differs from the previous three.

This Ripley possesses fragments of the original woman's memories, but her personality is colder, stranger and more unpredictable. She displays extraordinary physical ability and seems fascinated rather than simply horrified by the creatures around her.

Her relationship with the Xenomorphs is especially disturbing.

Where the original Ripley viewed them as a threat that had to be destroyed, Ripley 8 recognises something of herself in them. Their connection turns the franchise's long-running battle between Ripley and the Alien into something far more complicated.

Weaver embraces that difference, creating a character who looks familiar while constantly reminding us that the original Ellen Ripley is gone.

If there is one lesson humanity repeatedly refuses to learn in the Alien universe, it is that Xenomorphs do not belong in laboratories.

The scientists aboard the Auriga nevertheless attempt to breed and study them.

They keep their specimens behind reinforced barriers and subject them to experiments while researchers convince themselves the situation is under control.

The Xenomorphs quickly demonstrate otherwise.

Their escape turns the enormous ship into another enclosed hunting ground, continuing one of the franchise's defining traditions while dramatically increasing the number of potential victims.

With the Auriga heading towards Earth, the danger is no longer limited to those aboard.

Arriving aboard the Auriga is the crew of the small transport ship Betty.

The group includes Frank Elgyn, Johner, Christie, Vriess, Hillard and the mysterious Annalee Call, played by Winona Ryder.

They initially have no idea what the military scientists have been creating aboard the ship.

That changes very quickly.

Once the Xenomorphs escape, the surviving crew members find themselves alongside Ripley attempting to reach the Betty before the Auriga completes its journey.

Their rough-edged personalities give Alien Resurrection a different ensemble dynamic from either the Nostromo crew or the Colonial Marines, with Ron Perlman's aggressive Johner becoming one of the film's most memorable supporting characters.

Ripley is not the only character aboard the Auriga whose humanity is more complicated than it first appears.

Call has deliberately travelled to the ship with her own agenda and an unusual interest in Ripley.

The discovery of her true nature adds another layer to the film's obsession with artificial and manufactured life.

The Alien series had explored similar questions through characters such as Ash and Bishop, but Resurrection approaches them from another direction.

Ripley is biologically human but carries something Alien within her.

Call looks human but was created rather than born.

Together they blur the increasingly uncertain boundary between human, artificial and alien life.

Among the film's standout sequences is the survivors' journey through a flooded section of the Auriga.

With conventional routes blocked, the group must swim through submerged corridors to continue towards the Betty.

Unfortunately, Xenomorphs can swim too.

Watching the creatures glide rapidly through the water gives them a completely different kind of movement and creates one of the film's strongest demonstrations of their adaptability.

Escaping the water offers little relief, as the survivors find another obstacle between them and safety.

It's pure Alien survival horror: keep moving, don't look back and hope the creature isn't already ahead of you.

One of Alien Resurrection's darkest scenes has nothing to do with a Xenomorph attack.

Ripley discovers the failed experiments that preceded her successful creation.

The grotesque results reveal exactly what the scientists were prepared to produce while attempting to reconstruct both Ripley and the Queen.

For Ripley 8, the discovery becomes horrifyingly personal.

These aren't merely laboratory specimens. They are distorted versions of herself — failed attempts at creating the person she has become.

Her response is one of the film's most powerful moments and reinforces the central horror underlying the entire experiment: neither Ripley nor the Alien was brought back because anyone cared about the consequences.

They were brought back because somebody wanted to see if it could be done.

The genetic contamination responsible for Ripley 8 also affects the Xenomorph Queen.

The consequences produce something unprecedented.

Rather than laying eggs in the familiar way, the Queen develops a new reproductive system and gives birth to a hybrid creature commonly known as the Newborn.

Its appearance deliberately combines recognisable Xenomorph characteristics with disturbingly human features.

Even more unsettling is its relationship with Ripley.

The creature recognises her as something resembling its mother, creating a twisted reversal of the connection established between Ripley and the Alien throughout the film.

It remains one of the strangest and most divisive creatures the franchise has ever produced.

French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet brought a visual sensibility to Alien Resurrection unlike any previous director in the franchise.

The film is filled with distorted faces, industrial machinery, strange humour and grotesque biological imagery.

That tonal eccentricity makes it immediately distinguishable from Ridley Scott's haunted-house horror, James Cameron's military action and David Fincher's oppressive prison nightmare.

Not every choice landed with audiences, but nobody could accuse the fourth film of simply repeating its predecessors.

Like each Alien director before him, Jeunet made the universe his own.

Alien Resurrection occupies a peculiar place in the franchise.

It reversed the apparent finality of Alien 3, brought Sigourney Weaver back in an entirely new version of her defining character and pushed the series hundreds of years beyond the world audiences previously knew.

Its mixture of horror, action, grotesque imagery and eccentric humour remains divisive.

Yet its strangest ideas are also what make it interesting.

Rather than pretending Ellen Ripley could simply return unchanged, the movie makes her resurrection the central source of unease. The woman standing beside the Xenomorphs isn't quite the Ripley we remember — and even she doesn't entirely know what she has become.

Four movies into the saga, the Alien had changed.

So had Ripley.

And perhaps bringing either of them back was always going to have consequences.